From Crawford to Waterloo

Where does it come from, this silly and feigned idea that it’s good to be able
to claim a small-town background?…Overall demographic impulses to one side, there is nothing about a bucolic upbringing that breeds the skills necessary to govern a complex society in an age of globalization and violent unease. We need candidates who know about laboratories, drones, trade cycles, and polychrome conurbations both here and overseas. Yet the media make us complicit in the myth—all politics is yokel?—that the fast-vanishing small-town life is the key to ancient virtues. Wasilla, Alaska, is only the most vivid recent demonstration of the severe limitations of this worldview.

Not as vivid as Crawford, Texas, given that Palin hasn’t actually been president yet. But no matter, the point is the same. Small-town life is the key to nothing in particular, except maybe boredom. “Vote for me, I was bored while growing up.” Tempting, but no.

20 Responses to “From Crawford to Waterloo”

I grew up in a small town. It had some advantages, but, overall, I hated the place. And it certainly didn’t prepare me for the larger world except, perhaps, in one special sense: The crime rate was so boringly low I was allowed from an early age to roam anywhere — town or countryside — so long as I made it home for supper.. It’s possible that encouraged a certain independence. But I don’t wish to suggest that a small town is required for such.

On the downside, the social pressures to conform we so great that I was repeatedly ostracized for such trivial things as announcing my agnosticism or refusing to sing the school song. Perhaps Bachmann herself would approve of such mindless, reflexive social control. In which case, she can go hang herself. City air is free air.

I like the way Hitch challenged the current obsession with small town backgrounds — I sometimes think the entire US thinks Garrison Keilor writes documentaries — but I could have done without the implication that a small-town background inhibits a candidate from understanding complex politics.

Chris, Hitchens didn’t say a small town background inhibits a candidate from understanding complex politics, he said a small town background does nothing to prepare a candidate for understanding complex politics.

Boredom? For some, I’m sure; if your interests are city things then of course the country is boring (I find it the opposite). If small towns are not key to anything in particular, I’m yet to be convinced that the reverse is true of cities. Key is who you know, no? Bachman and Palin play that game very well, and certainly do not have a monopoly on a blinkered world view. I’m not sure there’s a locale in the world that could rescue either one of them.

All over the world we’re seeing the liberating power of urbanization. India, China, the Arab world, hell, even in the US as the small towns die and crumble. I grew up in the countryside and while there were things I enjoyed about it, ultimately life, education. culture, and prosperity lie in the cities. It has always been like this, and always will be. There’s a reason totalitarian movements love the peasant class so much, and that the Communist movements here in Asia deliberately emptied out the cities and killed or broke the intellectuals. And none of this even touches on the ecological benefits of urbanization or the farce of the idea of “small town values” (when statistically, urban people in the US behave much better than their small town counterparts, “real America” my ass).

Well, it’s still true, isn’t it? Sure, if you’re lucky or a bearded survivalist hermit you can forge a life for yourself in the middle of nowhere, but meanwhile, establishing a personal economy and freedom of movement is more likely when everything you need is less than two hours away from you.

I think this country thing started with reagan in a plaid shirt with sleeves rolled up “clearing brush at the ranch”…..and republicans just can’t see how one can do better than emulate, in some way, the great sainted hero of “modern” republicanism.

I think it’s something you inherited from the English. They have this idea about a mythical bucolic community life like in the Shire, where hard-working, honest, essentially innocent folk earn the bread of the family with the sweat of their brow. But they don’t think it’s real.

It didn’t start with Reagan, or with the English. It’s been going on for thousands of years, around the world, presumably since the dawn of civilization. Country folk have been railing against the cities and citified people with their citified ways for thousands of years. Especially the big cities that are major trading centers, where people deal with foreigners and adopt foreign ways—whoring around with foreign gods and foreign concepts like aqueducts and plumbing and interesting food and such.

It was a big theme of Roman culture, that real virtue was found among small farmers and that the city was for effete softies. I was brought up on a farm and I still have a sneaking sense that real raw life is with people who grow things and that urban life is alienated and parasitic. It’s the old rural contempt for “townies” – the ones who thought milk came out of bottles and hated the idea that their meat once mooed.

I grew up in Cedar Rapids, not far from Waterloo. Waterloo is an intellectual and economic wasteland, filled with slackers, boobs, hayseeds, zealots and stiffs. The flood of 2008 was the most refreshing cultural event there in decades. Ms Bachmann is a perfect representative of her hometown.

The drive for small town qualifications has puzzled me about politics, and reminds me of the anti-intellectualism that was celebrated in many some political campaigns for 2010. The former seems either pointless or irrelevant while the latter is frankly stupid. I think both come down to anti-elitism, which is further puzzling because Republicans run on platforms that in sum benefit the elite.

Yeah, as people commented, not a new trope at all. The Roman gentry were crazy about it; city-dwelling, educated, affluent, slave-keeping assholes waxing poetic about how great the life of the noble farmer was. Picture David Brooks in a designer toga and you’ve got it. Bonus points for picturing him writing columns praising Caesar and then kissing Cassius’ ass two years later, and patienly explaining that Cicero had it coming somewhere in the mix.

Toss this “bucolic is best” attitude on the scrap heap with “Vote for the candidate you’d like to have a beer with.”

I don’t want a folksy “every-man” in charge. I want the smartest damn person we can find. I want someone I would be embarrassed to have a beer with. Someone so obviously smarter and better educated than me that I immediately feel inferior. You know, someone with a snowballs chance in hell of actually solving some of the problems we have.

It would be less insulting if any of it were true… and almost none of it is. It is all make-believe small town kabuki. They live in the suburbs, in gated communities. Their fishing boats cost more than some people’s homes, their hunting is done out of rented lodges that cost more per night than most people make in a week, and their farms are big factory farms sucking up government subsidies.

I think it is a little more sinister than people thing…

I’m more and more convinced that the whole “small town guy/gal makes good by his own bootstraps” is part of the larger myth that allows the politicians to dismantle government services and the social contract in order to transfer wealth to the top 0.1%.

Another bullseye, from the same article, about a shibboleth that many of us on the Left (myself included) fall for:

This is dispiriting. But not as small-time and small-minded as the recent line adopted, from Dennis Kucinich to John Boehner and by the National Conference of Mayors, to the effect that any expenditure overseas is a theft from the good people of Waterloo (or, if you insist, Winterset), Iowa. You have heard it: A bridge or a well in Kandahar is one less facility for our hurting heartland. We should be tending to business in our own backyards. But it’s interesting that, on the zero-sum continuum, domestic concerns are balanced only against the needs of counterinsurgency and nation-building. There are many other controversial and costly programs that could serve to illustrate the same point, from the wasteful arsenal of nuclear weapons to the uncontrollable and unaccountable outlays on the “war on drugs.” But to propose these for cuts instead would involve making political choices that involved some arguments and necessitated some courage.

When Hitch is wrong he’s infuriating. When he’s right he’s devastating.

Think about traditional landed gentry & aristocrats, “Tory Democracy” per Randolph Churchill (Winston’s father,) in league with the peasants and yeoman, where wealth is based on land and at war with those they fear and detest: everything progressive — “trade,” cities, science, Jews, “cosmopolitanism,” democracy, debate & discussion, thinking.